[Footnote: Mr.R.A.Hinsdale, in his excellent work on the "Old Northwest" (New York, 1888), seems to me to lay too much stress on the weight which our charter-claims gave us, and too little on the right we had acquired by actual possession.

The charter-claims were elaborated with the most wearisome prolixity at the time; but so were the English claims to New Amsterdam a century earlier.
Conquest gave the true title in each case; the importance of a claim is often in inverse order to the length at which it is set forth in a diplomatic document.

The west was gained by: (1) the westward movement of the backwoodsmen during the Revolution; (2) the final success of the Continental armies in the east; (3) the skill of our diplomats at Paris; failure on any one of these three points would have lost us the west.
Mr.Hinsdale seems to think that Clark's conquest prevented the Illinois from being conquered from the British by the Spaniards; but this is very doubtful.

The British at Detroit would have been far more likely to have conquered the Spaniards at St.Louis; at any rate there is small probability that they would have been seriously troubled by the latter.
The so-called Spanish conquest of St.Joseph was not a conquest at all, but an unimportant plundering raid.
The peace negotiations are best discussed in John Jay's chapter thereon, in the seventh volume of Winsor's "Narrative and Critical History of North America." Sparks' account is fundamentally wrong on several points.

Bancroft largely follows him, and therefore repeats and shares his errors.] This view of the case is amply confirmed by a consideration of what was actually acquired under the treaty of peace which closed the Revolutionary struggle.